I arrive in Canvey Island, in the Essex constituency of Castle Point, suspecting to find evidence that the Purple Revolution is turning mauve. The self-proclaimed People’s Army once aimed for the skies, with a poll conducted around last year’s Clacton by-election projecting some 128 MPs at the

So, with 38 days to go to the general election, have you decided who you’ll vote for? If not, you’re not alone. Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos Mori, estimated earlier month that nearly half of people who would submit a ballot paper had not then made up their minds. Polls show Labour and the

If there’s one thing I remember 2013 for, it is an endless stream of friends informing me in overexcited terms that I absolutely had to listen to This American Life, the “utterly amazing” weekly hour-long podcast hosted by Ira Glass. And if there’s one thing late 2014 was characterised by, it was

My mobile telephone has been broken for three weeks now. Mercifully, the email, texting and Angry Birds functions still work, but the microphone is dead, meaning conversations require the use of the speaker phone, or attachment of the phone to the Bluetooth system of a car. Which, given I haven’t

JP Morgan executives have been sending out memos this week banning employees from making anything but minimal use of LinkedIn, the networking site. According to reports in eFinancialCareers.com, the heads of department at the bank, apparently exasperated by staff parading themselves as available

Boris Johnson was once quoted on National Public Radio in the US remarking that “if you vote for the Conservatives, your wife will get bigger breasts, and your chances of driving a BMW M3 will increase”. It was typically laddish banter from GQ’s former motoring correspondent, but it contained an

Thinking about it, Lewis Hamilton probably went through something similar during the last Formula One season, when the task of respectfully removing his cap for national anthems on the podium was invariably accompanied with a frenzy of desperate patting and preening. And George Osborne definitely

I’ve written elsewhere, at another time, about the agony of having an overdeveloped sense of sympathy. All sorts of strange things can set me off, from the sight of grown men in suits eating sandwiches in Pret A Manger after 5pm to London drivers parking in side streets just before 6pm to avoid

If you’ve not had time to read the profile of Sir Jonathan Ive in The New Yorker, which went viral the other day, do not fret. I spent a long afternoon wading through its 16,500 words and am happy to recount the main revelations. Apparently, Apple’s senior vice-president of design is a) very

The other month I went back to my home town to make a prize-giving speech at a state school that, in my youth, was renowned for producing feral pupils. To walk past its gates was to risk a kicking, but now it is transformed, churning out charming, ambitious students, every other one of whom seemed